What can Facebook and Western social networks learn, if anything?
If monetizing a social network is so easy, then why hasn’t Facebook opened up its payment API to third party developers? While the aggressive and intrusive hyper-viral aspects of the apps in China may not be replicable in a Western Market, the problems for creating a more viable business model run deeper. Western companies cannot innovate in the same way due to institutional problems stemming from their own struggle for an identity and revenue.
Facebook has just recently announced a “credits” system, but it seems to miss the mark. The new system demonstrates little incentive for users to shell over money, and does not speak to the same need as paying for a social application that all your friends are already on and talking about. Facebook may be afraid to become a marketplace for applications, because they are reluctant to be labeled as a social gaming network or a social app store. Instead, they are a self-styled guru of dynamic human interaction. If they opened up their platform to become an apps store, their major revenue streams would put them into a pigeonhole, calling their $15 billion valuation into question. They obviously don’t want to be labeled as a “gaming platform” either, and don’t want to fully depend on selling digital trinkets.
Like during the American gold rush in 1849, where Chinese merchants prospered while most prospectors went bust in search of striking gold, it appears that building viable, scalable businesses for Social Networking sites may still be an ancient Chinese secret for Westerners.
Did you wonder whether our economy had grown a little overly precious? How can we really be producing value if we're all sitting around blogging and Facebook-friending each other?
1999 the British think-tanker Charles Leadbeater published the book Living on Thin Air. It was both an appealing notion and a scary one: that we no longer have to produce anything but ideas. And that was even before Web 2.0--a platform for everyone to share their ideas, opinions, favorite tunes, and relationship statuses with each other. It was all a lot of fun, but I occasionally wondered whether it was really good for economic productivity.
it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.
But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.
Socializing as a distraction has always existed. Though there are more ways to do this now, people still have the ability to recognize that which produces real value in their life, both economically and socially. Balance between these has always been a challenge.
A few years from now, only the successful, profitable, and useful will survive.
It acknowledges that design in the era of ubiquitous technologies means not only technical innovation, but deep understanding of behavior
This compels a new approach to design that is partly technical, but also deeply social and humanist.
Understanding activity means understanding values, needs, lifestyle, mythologies, aesthetics, social and cultural norms, and individual and social psychology
THE MCCAIN NEGATIVE WORDCLOUDWords Not in McCain’s Tech Policy
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Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net, even if we consider the Net to be nothing but a way to move content to “consumers” (his word), McCain still gets it wrong. There’s nothing in his policy about encouraging the free flow of ideas. Instead, when McCain thinks about ideas, he thinks about how to increase the walls around them by cracking down on “pirates” and ensuring ” fair rewards to intellectual property” (which, technically speaking, I think isn’t even English). Ideas and culture are, to John McCain, business commodities. He totally misses the dramatic and startling success of the Web in generating new value via open access to ideas and cultural products.
The two candidates’ visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people.
Is it going to be our Internet or theirs?
“Senator McCain’s technology plan doesn’t put Americans first—it is a rehash of tax breaks and giveaways to the big corporations and their lobbyists who advise the McCain campaign. This plan won’t do enough for hardworking Americans who are still waiting for competitive and affordable broadband service at their homes and businesses. It won’t do enough to ensure a free and open Internet that guarantees freedom of speech. It won’t do anything to ensure that we use technology to bring transparency to government and free Washington from the grip of lobbyists and special interests. Senator McCain’s plan would continue George Bush’s neglect of this critical sector and relegate America’s communications infrastructure to second-class status. That’s not acceptable,” said William Kennard, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.
As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial." She thinks that the Silicon Valley patrons of the Fortune Brainstorm are failing to take China seriously, and that this denial will cause them to be "blindsided" by a "truly disruptive force."
"The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion. "We have to do more than just run around chasing deals."
As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial." She thinks that the Silicon Valley patrons of the Fortune Brainstorm are failing to take China seriously, and that this denial will cause them to be "blindsided" by a "truly disruptive force."
I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy's vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx's Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers.
As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe's in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.
China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen "à la carte."
这一文件是由一家名为Global Network Initiative（全球网络倡议）的实体负责制定的，起草小组人员包括了人权第一(Human Rights First)以及保护记者委员会(Committee to Protect Journalists)等人权组织。非盈利组织the Center for Democracy and Technology and Business for Social Responsibility（民主、技术和商业社会责任中心）也参与了制定。三家公司同意由独立专家监控他们对新原则的遵守情况。
We have to be aware of the fact that the Internet has given the youth living in controlled societies infinite venues for digital entertainment - without any religious or social censorship - that may not necessarily be enhancing their digital sense of citizenship and civic engagement. Risking the comfort of their bedrooms - with their hard-drives full of digital goodies - for the gloom of a prison cell does not appeal to many of them. The governments are all too happy to promote this new cult of "cyber-hedonism." Whatever keeps these troubled youths from the streets is inherently a good thing.
The fact that existing political activists embraced the Internet as a tool of mobilization is fairly noncontroversial. What's less obvious is how many digital natives the Internet has turned into digital renegades - and how many into digital captives. It's precisely this balance that will determine what the political landscape of Russia, China or Iran will look like in 10 years.
As a key element of the revival of Chairman Mao Zedong's "people's warfare," Beijing and a number of other cities have revived the vigilante and spying functions of neighborhood committees. Municipal administrations along the coast -- and in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang -- have recently earmarked additional budget to maintain the "spying" functions of neighborhood committees and similar vigilante outfits after the Olympics.
Moreover, the Politburo's Central Political and Legal Commission, China's highest law-enforcement agency, has urged the courts and prosecutors to do more in fulfilling the party's priority task of thwarting anti-Beijing conspiracies and upholding sociopolitical stability.
That the courts will comply in this is evident from a just-released article by the President of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Shengjun. Writing in this week's edition of the official Seeking Truth journal, Mr. Wang said: "We must pay more attention to maintaining state security and social stability. . . We must boost our consciousness of [safeguarding] the power of the regime . . . and fully develop our functions as a department for [proletarian] dictatorship."
If you are a long-time follower of the Turkish blogosphere you will have undoubtedly heard about the Turkish ban on Wordpress….and the periodic bans on YouTube, and on the social-networking widget site Slide, oh..and now on Dailymotion as well.
It is hard to keep track now-a-days and frustrating. Turkish bloggers feel the same way too, and are protesting the constant banning of sites by voluntarily banning their own.
So how are Turkish bloggers protesting these periodic bans on the internet? By putting the following up on their website: Bu siteye erişim kendi kararıyla engellenmiştir which translates roughly into “This site is blocked by [the author's] own choice”.
We hear that Tibetans suffer “demographic aggression” and “cultural genocide”. But we do not hear those terms applied to Spanish and French policies toward the Basque minority. We do not hear those terms applied to the US annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898. And Diego Garcia? In 1973, not so long ago, the UK forcibly deported the entire native Chagossian population from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. People were allowed one suitcase of clothing. Nothing else. Family pets were gassed, then cremated. Complete ethnic cleansing. Complete cultural destruction. Why? In order to build a big US air base. It has been used to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon maybe to bomb Iran and Pakistan. Diego Garcia, with nobody there but Brits and Americans, is also a perfect place for rendition, torture and other illegal actions.
The Chinese Context
The Chinese government is responsible for the well-being and security of one-fourth of humanity. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated, not even when done by Buddhist monks.
Chinese Civilization was already old when the Egyptians began building pyramids. But the last 200 years have not gone well, what with two Opium Wars forcing China to import drugs, and Europeans seizing coastal ports as a step to complete colonial control, then the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty, civil war, a brutal invasion and occupation by Japan, more civil war, then Communist consolidation and transformation of society, then Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Such events caused tens of millions of people to die. Thus, China’s recent history has good reasons why social order is a higher priority than individual rights. Race riots and rebellion cannot be tolerated.
Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.
China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished.
There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students.
China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.
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